10 Useful Tips for Virtual Team Building

A virtual team is groups of people whose members are interactive through electronic communication. They work together with a common purpose to achieve common projects and objectives. Most of the time, they are not located at the same place. That is why they perform tasks and jobs in a virtual work environment. As Internet growth, many companies prefer virtual teams because it is easy to work and useful for companies to save money.

There are two types of virtual work: Global and Local virtual team. In global virtual team, members can be located in different countries all over the world, while in local virtual team, they are usually at the same company. Working in a virtual team provides several advantages, like reduced rents and technology savings, lower transportation cost, less unnecessary meetings, increased productivity and 24-hour work day. In the following part, we'd like to walk through 10 tips for virtual team building, to help you manage virtual team well.

10 Tips for Virtual Team Building

1. Team Profiles

Ask your teammates to complete their profiles and post them to a shared data folder. The profiles must contain basic information of each member, like communication preference, pictures of most aspects of life, like kids, hobbies, photo of workplace and productive time. Ask them to share a little bit about themselves. This will help to know each other, and realizes the things they have in common.

2. Audio Visual

Instead of sending an email every day, try new ways of communicating by leaving a voicemail or a voice text message or briefly recording video for the work of the day.

3. Virtual Networking

Set a daily or weekly to call your virtual teammates and talk about personal matters. This will increase confident among you and your teammates. Take note of their personal and professional information. Acknowledge birthdays, company anniversary dates, and promotions with a quick message to let them know that you are thinking of them. Doing this will is useful for building trust in virtual teams.

Video conferencing is one of the popular ways for virtual communication. It is an innovative and popular way for companies to unite employees from all over the world. One of the best video conferencing solutions is ezTalks Cloud Meeting, a great communicate and collaborate tool for building virtual team, which provide great functionalities like hosting online meeting with capacity to 100 participants for free, face-to-face online collaboration, desktop sharing, online whiteboard sharing, useful recording and playback. It is easy to use among the most common operating system such as Android, iOS , Mac and Windows.

Use tools that enable you to share your screen, so that your teammates can know what you are doing. These tools can allow people to control another computer remotely. ezTalks Cloud Meeting is a fairly good choice.

6. Set Up a Project Management System

For building virtual teams, your virtual team should set up a project management system. The project management system is helpful in organizing documents and managing conversation into projects. If your business is running with emails only, it will become disorganized. There are many of them, like Wrike, Plan Project Management software, Zoho projects and Asana.

7. Implement System

Without system, your business can easily fall down. In virtual teams, each person can be in his or her own world and may develop the procedures that do not work with other teamwork. That is why, it is better to have a documented and standardized way of working in which we are constantly refining. Set rule for suggestion, building, testing and documentation that will work with every member.

8. Measure Your Teamwork Productivity

Another tip for building a virtual team is to measure the productivity of your virtual team. It will help you to know how your teams are engaged in their jobs. Time tracking software is the best option for tracking attendance ant it will allow you to track websites visited, applications used and time spent working and time on breaks. It will let you know whether or not your teammates are working or chatting with a friend on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

9. Hiring People Who Are Right for Your Virtual Work

Look at their environments at home. Do they have required skill for your work? Do they have quiet places to work? Are they constantly distracted by children in the house?

10. Pay Virtual Teammates Well

Many people want to work virtually and take a pay cut for the opportunity to work from home. If you pay your teammates well, you can be sure that your teamwork will still work with you for a long time.

Conclusion

Virtual work is good and advantageous for you and for your teammates. To have a strong team building for virtual teams, you have to ask your teammates to complete their profiles, use audio visual, virtual networking, screen sharing tools, and ezTalks Cloud Meeting for video conferencing, set up a project management system, implement system, measure your teamwork productivity, hiring people who are right for your virtual work and pay virtual teammates well.